I finished Ultima II in record time, and was desperate for more. Maybe I'm an easy sell, but I found this enchanting as a teenager, and it still makes me smile today. Fun? Absolutely: just the idea of saying "Hey! I wonder what kind of colony is on Mercury?" is enough to stir my imagination. The entire solar system was modeled (to a minimal degree) in the game you could land on every planet, and every planet had at least a small human outpost, which you could walk around and talk to people at and advance the plot. One of the best parts of the game, for me, was the space travel.
You could talk to every townsperson 90% of them had nothing interesting to say (every fighter, for example, would say "Ugh, me tough!" and every cleric would say "Believe!") A small minority of townspeople (often behind locked doors, almost always standing still) would give you bits and pieces of the plot, or clues about where to look next. Despite this focus, there was a plot of sorts. The game centered around combat, which was fast and furious: enemies walked up to you in the wild and you beat on each other until one of you died. I liked the little staticky sound the game made when you hit a bad guy. I liked the various eras you could travel to: there were frigates in the seas in the middle ages, go back far enough in time and you're in Pangaea, go ahead far enough and you find yourself in a world after the nuclear holocaust. I liked that it had time travel, and that the portals you walked through were called "moongates" - that sounded really cool and science fictiony. I liked that it took place on a map of Earth rather than in some amorphous fantasyland. The Queen is the King and the King is a spy Ah, innocence.Īsk me no questions, I'll tell you no lies At the age of 13, I found the very idea of a powerful, evil villain being a woman to be very surprising, even transgressive. Sure, it's standard fantasy garbage, but it was very well packaged standard fantasy garbage. (Minax, it seems, was the apprentice of the wizard the player allegedly assassinated in the first Ultima game, but I hadn't played that yet).
I wasn't too clear on why she had to die, but the game manual said so, and I was a big believer in obeying authority. The goal of Ultima II was to kill the Enchantress, Minax. The packaging was part of the excitement of the game - it came with a wonderful cloth printed map of the Earth.
I remember staring at the fabulous box cover art in a software store - in 1982, when the idea of a store that sold software was itself an innovative and risky idea - and saying to myself, "I must have that". The first Ultima game I played was Ultima II. This, therefore, seems like a good time to talk about the Ultima games and their progress through the years.
Also included are various fan-authored remakes and ports (such as Exult and XU4), full documentation for every game, and just to add insult to injury a series of videoclips of Richard Garriott (a.k.a. I actually already own all of the Ultima games - some in their Apple ][, Commodore 64, Vic-20 (!), and Amiga platforms, along with emulators to run the non-PC native ports.
It’s floating around the ether, and if you have a Windows PC and are at all interested in classic games I recommend you track it down.
The most recent wave of nostalgia to overcome me is the “Ultima Classics” package put together by one very obsessive-compulsive fan. This works for old home computers, too, and of course computer games. Er, not that I’d know), that’s the one that you feel nostalgic for. Basically, whatever your first console was (or, whatever the first console that your best friend had but your parents wouldn’t get for you was, so later in life you feel compelled to buy them on eBay. If you ask people (or at least American men) who grew up in certain eras what the best video game consoles were, you will get different answers - I’m in the Atari 2600 camp, those about 5 years younger than me will talk about the original Nintendo Entertainment System, those a few years younger than that will talk about the Sega Genesis or the SNES, and so on. However - as the regular reader may be able to guess - when it comes to obsolete videogames, I am completely in thrall to the teenager in my head. I try to consciously choose introspection instead of nostalgia whenever I can. Some part of the past is thought of as good because it wells up nostalgic feelings, rather than because of anything one can qualify objectively. We grow by moving forward, and though sometimes that involves looking back introspectively, nostalgia is the opposite of introspection: it is the fetishism of the past. Nostalgia, in general, is an emotion that I am suspicious of.